KANDAHAR AIRFIELD—Being on a big military base, even one in a relatively dangerous spot, can feel a bit like being on a cruise ship. Grand exertions are made to ensure comfort, and leisure is organized: basketball at six, bingo at 11. B-list celebrities, armed with camera-ready smiles, are on deck to shake your hand. The food is rich and plentiful, and cooked with the primary goal of not sickening anyone. And there's no exit, other than jumping overboard, or over the concertina wire. Base life is, as Samuel Johnson might have said, like being in prison, with a chance of being mortared.

During my two years in Iraq, spent primarily on military bases, the soldiers I met tended to be American, with at most a tiny contingent of foreigners in each place to make the forces technically multinational. (My favorites were the Albanians, a gang of a few dozen angry warriors whose dark, olive-drab camouflage blended terribly into the daylight of Mosul. Americans who worked with the Albanians said they came out at night to prowl the base perimeter, knives in their teeth, in search of insurgents.)

In Kandahar, the military internationalism is real, and it is dizzying. Among a vast array of tents—mostly half-pipe structures with wooden interiors and air-conditioning—there are French, Dutch, Romanian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Australian, American, British, and Canadian ghettos, with the Canadians the plurality. In the dining facilities, it's common to hear half a dozen languages, not including the Dravidian tongues of the servers. Familiar military acronyms are translated into other languages. "Think OPSEC," or "operational security," say the loose-lips-sink-ships reminders posted on bases in Iraq. Here, a poster of a coffin draped with a Canadian flag adds, "PENSEZ SECOP."

The military goes to great lengths to keep the wide coalition happy, starting with the food. Echo's, a restaurant open to paying customers, serves Dutch food (I've been meaning to try it), and one of the mess halls, "Cambridge," specializes in the cuisine of the British Isles (you'd have to pay me to try it again). Another mess, "Niagara," serves North American cooking, and still another serves Mediterranean cuisine. What unites all the mess halls is that nearly every dish contains pig products, a remarkable achievement in a country where swine are reviled, and therefore scarce. (Off bases in Afghanistan, I have never seen pork anywhere—except, incredibly, in Chelsea Supermarket in central Kabul, which stocked a big bin of pork rinds near the entrance.)

These efforts to pamper soldiers sometimes border on the ridiculous. Many have noted the luxuries of modern warfare—the portable Burger Kings and Pizza Huts dragged into battle by the United States, the military stores stocked with video games and potato chips, the overpriced Potemkin bazaars constructed on bases, so soldiers have a place to buy local souvenirs. The Canadians have imported a fully functioning outpost of the coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons; there is a line out the door at all hours. When I remarked on the eagerness of the military to bring the comforts of home to the battlefield, I heard a fellow Canadian reporter say that if I went to the British area I could even try curling. For a moment it sounded almost plausible that the military would, to appease its winter-sport fanatics, keep a sheet of ice chilled in the blazing heat of southern Afghanistan. (It turned out he said "curry.")

Also see:The Army We Have
To fight today's wars with an all-volunteer force, the U.S. Army needs more quick-thinking, strong, highly disciplined soldiers. But creating warriors out of the softest, least-willing populace in generations has required sweeping changes in basic training. By Brian Mockenhaupt

Does this coddling make soldiers soft? A Vietnam veteran in Iraq, then working for DynCorp, complained that today's soldiers "aren't worth a hair on a Nam vet's ass" and had let their core fighting skills wane. But many others have argued that today's soldiers match or exceed their predecessors' skills, and that creature comforts are the least the military can provide.

For my part, after time in the velvet embrace of this big base and time at smaller, less opulent ones, I wonder whether the cosseting might not exactly make soldiers soft, so much as threaten their long-term morale. The happiest soldiers I met were the ones who spend months at a time in bleak, perilous conditions, and who scorn the doughnuts and menus of their less exposed countrymen. They deride soldiers and contractors who sequester themselves at bases like Kandahar's as "fobbits" (for "Forward Operating Base") and "Hesco Hobbits" (for the Hesco barriers that provide on-base shelter from rocket and mortar attacks).

"They don't understand us," says a military policeman at a tiny, spartan outpost that takes regular fire from insurgents. "They have their Timmy's. When we go there, they're like, 'Why do you look like that?' Well, no showers, for one. And the Taliban are trying to kill us." A few months ago he was wounded in a firefight, and he now has a fresh scar by his eye.

The world of regular firefights seems distant at Kandahar Airfield's Catwalk—a large square of desert, marked off by a boardwalk of fast-food trailers and souvenir shops. These shops suggest why the comforts could end up doing harm. The aroma of individual-size pizzas fills the air, and they remind soldiers of home. But these greasy, frisbee-sized madeleines are really reminders that they're not home. They're far from it, and stuck with an inferior alternative. In the Canadians' clubhouse, the life-size cardboard cut-out of Don Cherry, beloved hockey commentator for the CBC, is a reminder of their nation's most popular sport, but also a reminder of how far away they are from their living rooms and friends. A Canadian Navy lieutenant notes that the soldiers who are constantly calling home tend to be the ones most likely to pose disciplinary problems.

Are the Pizza Huts and Tim Hortons self-defeating, then? I think so. For me, the real comforts—and they are few—of being on a military base in Afghanistan are uncomplicated, and equally available to the frontline fighters and the soldiers supporting them in the rear. After dark in both places, the dirt roads go silent, but for the purr of generators and air-conditioners, and perhaps the lulling farts of small-arms fire in the distance. The quiet is a deliverance from the anxiety of the day, and the calm (perhaps comparable to the silent, snow-muffled freeze of the Canadian prairie) is something to savor. The swelter of the Afghan summer subsides to mere cozy warmth. The stars are bright. And they shine on us all, in Edmonton and Kandahar alike.

Most Popular

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.